Human Migration in Historical Perspective

Once civilized societies had taken root in the Far East in India and around the eastern Mediterranean as well as in the Middle East the resulting social diversity complicated and at the same time structured subsequent patterns of human migration. It is possible to distinguish 4 possible forms of migration: radical displacement of 1 population by another as a result of systematic exercise of force; conquest of 1 population by another leading to symbiosis of 2 previously diverse communities on the same ground; infiltration by outsiders with some degree of acquiescence from existing populations and without displacing existing rulers; and importation of individuals or even of whole communities that had been forcibly uprooted from their initial place of residence by slave raiders and/or traders. Of these the first was and remained characteristic of barbarian societies that is of societies organized on kinship lines in which nearly every family did the same sorts of things as every other family. Basic to civilized society was the fact that cities became seats of intensified infection to the extent that urban populations were incapable of sustaining themselves biologically. This changed only in the 2nd half of the 19th century when public health measures and the advance of scientific medicine made it possible to interrupt the cycles of infection for a wide variety of crowd diseases. The juxtaposition of civilized agricultural societies with steppe nomads and seafaring communities within the Eurasian context also provoked 2 other comparatively slender migration patterns that nonetheless played important parts in historic development. One was military and the other mercantile. The barbarian ideal of an ethnically homogeneous nation is incompatible with the normal population dynamics of civilization. Only since World War II have European nations begun to experience the ethnic mingling that was common in civilized lands of the deeper past. Dieoff at the center and recruitment from ethnically diverse peripheries again prevail in post-1950 Europe and America. Consequently polyethnic lamination is again asserting itself in the Soviet Union as much as in France Germany the UK and the US.